Sunday, 17 November 2019

Minister seek to tax telcos MoMo profit

The
Minister of Communication, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, is pushing for the taxing
of profits made from mobile money (MoMo) transactions by the telecommunication
companies in Ghana.

According
to the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Ablekuma West constituency, the telcos
are able to generate GHS71 million in profits per month and that must be taxed.

“This
is of particular interest to me but this is where the Finance Minister and me
diverge because I think that GHS71 million which is generated by the operators
in transaction fees, they ought to pay taxes on that revenue to the State,” she
said at a press conference in Accra, last week, as she revealed: “We are still
having conversations about that”.

Meanwhile,
the minister has disclosed that the state has managed to make tax savings of
GHS205.6 million in fraud management following the introduction of the Common
Platform.

On
mobile money monitoring, the minister said the platform has reported an average
monthly usage of GHS 29.1 billion, 195.8 million transactions, with GHS71
million generated by the operators in transaction fees, with further breakdowns
of transaction types for informed policy decision making.

According
to the minister, the introduction of the Common Platform has uncovered that
prior to its introduction, GHS300 million in taxes was lost from potential
under-declarations between 2015 to Q1 of 2017.

“An estimated GHS470
million in taxes was saved between Q1 of 2017 to date as a result of the
announcement of the implementation of the CP on March 8th, 2017 and its actual
implementation to date. There would have been a potential loss of a total of
GHS1.5 billion through to the end of the CP contract, had the CP not been
implemented”, she said.